1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to wireless communications and more specifically to on-demand quality of service guarantees in a wireless network environment.
2. Introduction
The increasing use of mobile applications has prompted a growing demand for mobile access to online content. Online applications, such as multimedia online gaming, content streaming, mobile TV, and Web 2.0, have quickly emerged to serve this growing demand for mobile data connectivity. However, online applications often face difficult challenges resulting from network and performance limitations. For example, the quality of the online experience provided by online applications depends largely on the quality of the network and availability of high-speed data. Yet the quality of the network and availability of high-speed data is often limited and difficult to control and predict, particularly as the application performance demands and diversity of the network increase. These challenges have catapulted efforts to improve current wireless access technologies to keep pace with the increasing network and data quality and performance demands of online applications.
One such effort is the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for wireless communications. LTE provides a standard for wireless communications of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals, which brings substantial performance improvements and a significantly enhanced user experience with full mobility. LTE, through its radio access, the Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN), provides improved throughputs, higher capacity, and better overall performance. But while LTE brings significant benefits, it also faces significant hurdles in Quality of Service (QoS) control. Unlike traditional telecommunications networks, which implement traditional QoS approaches such as best-effort delivery, network resources reservation, or packet marking on data communication paths, LTE frequently utilizes different logical paths for signaling and data transfer. As a result, traditional QoS approaches are often inadequate in the LTE context.
LTE overcomes some of the inadequacies of traditional QoS approaches by implementing a policy entity which links the signaling and data transfer planes to allow QoS at the data transfer plane. Currently, the policy entity can enforce pre-defined QoS parameter values and change these values according to a local configuration or instructions from another policy entity. However, the policy entity is unable to adapt to meet a required on-demand QoS that cannot otherwise be met due to network resource constraints; this on-demand QoS is simply denied. Accordingly, LTE networks are limited in their capacity to meet a user application QoS, such as throughput, minimum delays, and minimum interruption in user data transfer, when a network resource, such as the radio access, has reached an upper capacity limit.